Bill Frezza is a 35-year veteran of the technology industry. After graduating from MIT with degrees in both science and engineering, Bill spent his early years at Bell Laboratories. Since then, he has worked as a product manager, salesman, marketer, entrepreneur, consultant, technology evangelist, and venture capitalist. Bill holds seven patents and has been investing in early-stage tech startups for the last 17 years as a partner in a venture capital firm. Since 2008, he has been writing weekly opinion columns for publications such as RealClearMarkets.com, Forbes.com, the Huffington Post and Bio-IT World and appeared regularly on TV and radio outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and WBAL. In 2011, he was a finalist for the Hoiles Prize for excellence in American journalism and in October 2013, he became the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2013-2014 Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow. In January 2014, Bill began hosting RealClear Radio Hour airing Saturdays on Boston’s WXKS 1200AM & WJMN 94.5FM-HD2.

Is Drug War Driven Mass Incarceration the New Jim Crow?

Once in a great while a writer at the opposite end of the political spectrum gets you to look at a familiar set of facts in a new way. Disconcerting as it is, you can feel your foundation shift as your mind struggles to reconcile this new point of view with long held beliefs. Michelle Alexander has done just that in her book, The New Jim Crow.

A liberal ideologue with impeccable leftist credentials, Alexander was Director of the Racial Justice Project at the American Civil Liberties Union before moving on to an appointment in Race and Ethnicity studies at Ohio State University. Her thesis pushes disparate-impact logic to an extreme, ascribing deeply racist motives to a society that has traveled a very long way since the system of legal and cultural discrimination known as Jim Crow stained the land.

Yet there is no denying that if your goal were to consign African Americans to a permanent underclass—one which the rest of us would be culturally and legally permitted to discriminate against in employment, housing, voting rights, and government benefits—the war on drugs would be a great way to do it.

Alexander spouts statistics with which we are all familiar. Approximately half a million people are in prison or in jail for a drug offense today, compared to around 41,000 in 1980. Four out of five drug arrests are for simple possession, 80% for marijuana. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence.

At the end of 2007, more than 7 million Americans were behind bars, on probation, or on parole, many whose initial violation of the drug laws spiraled into a life of crime. This is a level of mass incarceration unprecedented in history. And despite the fact that surveys show that whites are just as likely to use illegal drugs as blacks, one out of every 14 black men was behind bars in 2006, compared to one in 106 white men.

It is that last bit that deserves attention. Through a series of anecdotes accompanied by a steady drumbeat of statistics, Alexander makes a compelling case that one of the key pillars of the fruitless war on drugs is selective enforcement coupled with plea bargain-driven judicial railroading.

Police patrols of inner-city African-American neighborhoods are characterized by a degree of hyper-aggressive vigilance, constitutionally dubious intrusiveness, and occasional brutality that would absolutely not be tolerated in the white suburbs. The vast majority of the people I went to college with smoked marijuana. Were law enforcement evenhanded, instead of growing up to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and entrepreneurs, we would all be unemployable former felons.

It is this mark of Cain, the brand of the former felon, which Alexander claims is the tool that a racist society uses to turn young black men foolish enough to get involved in drugs into permanent members of the underclass. Unable to re-integrate into society because of the legal and cultural barriers that permit former felons to be treated the way Jim Crow treated African Americans, the 650,000 people released from prison every year are virtually driven into a life of crime through the systematic elimination of other options.

Yes, the book gives short shrift to the role that personal responsibility plays in all this. If you lived in a police state with half your friends in jail, knowing you might be pulled over on a pretext at any moment, why in the world would you drive around with marijuana in your car? Despite that caveat, it’s hard to lay claim to rationality and still support drug prohibition, the results of which mirror the horrors of our country’s ill-fated experiment with alcohol prohibition.

Opinion leaders, on both the right and left, have spoken out against the insane war on drugs for as long as politicians have been hiding their heads in the sand while they compete to see who is the toughest law and order advocate. An enormous police and prison industrial complex has grown up that is completely dependent on keeping the mass incarceration movement alive. Our country cannot seem to find a way to stop the madness, as we did when we repealed the 18th Amendment, which had imposed nationwide alcohol prohibition. Of the leading presidential candidates, only Ron Paul has stepped up to address the issue, with a snowball’s chance in hell of anyone else picking up the call for drug decriminalization.

It’s as chilling to believe that drug warriors are perpetrating non-racial means to marginalize African Americans as it is to believe that Planned Parenthood is practicing genocide by playing a leading role in terminating 40% of black pregnancies, making abortion the leading cause of death among African Americans. But the logic of disparate impact analysis inevitably leads you to both those conclusions.

Whether you agree with her thesis or not, Michelle Alexander makes you think about mass incarceration in a new way. The pro-life movement could take a lesson from her if they hope to inject some fresh thinking into their advocacy.

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I suspect that, if the drug laws were not being enforced, the same folks would be complaining about THAT, and playing the same old race card: “The white powers-that be are happy for black people to become drug addicts because rich white people don’t care about poor black people” — something like that. Instead of railing against the enforcement of the drug laws, why not rail against drug use?

Good to see Forbes bring additional light to this issue through a critical assessment of Alexander’s work.

Like most things in America, Blacks benefit the least from what she has to offer and suffers the most from what ails her.

The comment, “If you lived in a police state with half your friends in jail, knowing you might be pulled over on a pretext at any moment, why in the world would you drive around with marijuana in your car?” while understandable given the target audience, is somewhat insulting and undermines the root cause of the problem by shifting blame to the victim.

We also published a review here: http://aalbc.com/reviews/new_jim_crow.html though I like this one more.

“as it is to believe that Planned Parenthood is practicing genocide by playing a leading role in terminating 40% of black pregnancies, ”

These subjects are not even remotely related why was it important to tie the drug war to the abortion debate? If anything they are related to the destruction of families, abortion is a symptom of the pain the raciest drug war is causing families in minority communities.

The connection between labeling the drug war the new Jim Crow and identifying abortion as African American genocide is the use of disparate impact analysis, that is, the faulty logic of working backwards from outcomes to assign motivations. If you look at the author’s career, that has been her linchpin.

It is highly doubtful that most people who support the war on drugs do so as a conscious plan to discriminate racially. Here is the important difference between the drug case and the abortion case: if a black baby is aborted, it is a black mother making the individual choice. Let’s avoid arguing about the baby’s “rights”; in my view it’s not a person yet. In the drug case, people are violently and involuntarily thrown into jail by the government. Even if your views are colored by highly debatable theological metaphysical assumptions, in the abortion case it is not the government calling the shots, but the mother, who is the only person who could ever possibly possess the right to make that decision in any kind of decent world.

Moving on to the drug issue, it matters little whether the overall intent is Jim Crow 2.0; what matters is the practical effect of the policy. Policies deserve to be judged on their practical effect, not on their moral intentions.

I’m a white, 52, married, college educated, financially solvent, gainfully employed professional homeowner. I also had a 2 year problem with drug addiction in my mid-40s. I learned a few things from that experience. I have no criminal record even though I came close to ruining my life by getting arrested. I owe that good fortune probably only to the fact that I’m white; it’s much easier to get busted when driving around town with drugs in the car in the middle of the night if you’re black. I have had a lot of opportunity to witness this first hand. It’s much more likely that neighbors will report “suspicious” activity when lots of black people are coming in and out of your house. Racism today is mostly about impressions, perceptions, subtle subjective judgements, not as much overt conscious hatred. These subtleties greatly increase the chances of police officers having suspicions when encountering black folks, a bias that is only confirmed by the large percentage of blacks in prison.

I had the freedom to make mistakes that I learned harmed my life, and I had the opportunity to recover without being incarcerated. I’m a good person who was in a lot of pain and temporarily sought escape and relief from unbearable emotional pain via the pleasure of drugs. I recognize all the ways that mistake hurt me, but at least I had the freedom to correct my own mistakes, and I harmed nobody but myself. Among drug users I met there were a lot of other people who are tender feeling loving human beings who are caught up in painful circumstances and who find relief in drugs. These people are not criminals; they are human beings with natural human weaknesses.

Our current anti-drug system of moral retribution is costly, not only to tax payers but also in terms of catastrophic emotional and psychological harm to families and individuals who are caught up in this over-broad drug dragnet. For the non-violent offenders with no record of property crimes it is not much different than keeping political prisoners, except these are people guilty of an intellectual crime that qualifies as violation of religious moral codes rather than political ideological codes.

This is a national disgrace, and in future we will look back on it with the same shame as we look back on other national disgraces: injustice toward Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Did you read the book? Saying that Alexander uses “disparate impact analysis” to assign motivations collapses a multifaceted argument into a facile discussion of who-did-this-and-why. You can’t take a vast, complicated system of social and legal control (such as Jim Crow) and try to assign a single “motivation,” as if one piece of legislation or one powerful individual created the system. That is clearly not the case.

On the other hand, if a society creates a massive penal system, gives law enforcement almost unbridled breadth in its ability to arrest and imprison people, blinds the legal system to existent and proven racial discrimination, and disenfranchises the victims — what do you think will happen? Will a historically underserved and maligned minority benefit from this system? Will those responsible for the system be blind to the outcomes? And will a single, unambiguous “motivation” for this system become clear?

Of course not. Assuming that there must be a single “motivation” for a deliberately unjust system to exist is shallow thinking, and is not part of Alexander’s argument.

Since an anti-drug program is nowhere authorized in the Constitution, politicians, police, and courts that trample the right of Americans to ingest what they choose are themselves criminals and should be indicted for violating their Oaths of Office, as well as the many crimes they perpetrate against Americans they attack.

Selling and using drugs should be treated in exactly the same manner as are selling and using shoes or oranges.

I am not sure insinuating an equivalence between the drug war and abortions is appropriate. The two are actually tied together. There are many reasons to get an abortion, could being trapped in a permanent underclass be a major one? That is, the drug war creates the conditions for being in a permanent underclass which then entails an increased prevalence of abortions. So while it looks sexy to come up with a new right-wing meme it is based on some faulty logic. Not that that will stop the right from taking this meme and using it to undermine Alexander’s arguments.

And it doesn’t change with a new administration. For the difference between white liberals and white conservatives, see Malcolm X’s 1963 speech, God’s Judgement of White America (The Chickens Come Home to Roost)…